Please look into it before getting too down on it.. You want to see what it can actually do when pushed right to the edge? This is totally without going beyond C, the 8-bit Integer FFT and Butterfly/Hamming window calculations lib is done in C rather than Arduino, as it has no external calls. A few cycles faster at best. I got featured on on Make magazine's blog for this one:
That's a 64 band realtime Fourier transformation and sampling, with video out, all being done on my BoArduino - There is no hardware analysis being done- it's raw wave sampled and processed with a 128byte buffer... and with an earlier, much less efficient version of the TVout lib. YouTube doesn't do it justice, doing all that, the spectrum analyzer refresh is at least 10-15 full data refeshes per second.. only two full scans per data display, which some would argue is faster than should be displayed for such an analysis. I did it for a light show, so it doesn't matter... but let's just say that the assertion the TVout lib is a dog is not exactly accurate, hehe. Don't underestimate what a little efficient code can accomplish. The code is on my blog- it's nothing fancy, just doesn't waste a lot of resources and just goes as fast as the little hamster in the resonator can make it go 'round.
As for the BoArduino, It's just an Uno without the onboard USB/serial chip. 100% Atmel ATMEGA328, no magic just tight code. I've also got my camera trigger project with delay resolution from nanoseconds from the impulse, and scalable delays with microsecond resolution.. all with TVout interface (on that DVD player screen, usually)...
About the only thing that gets to be a little painful is interrupts and the memory footprint of the video data.. but for most applications, the tvout lib is the cheapest and simplest text display available, bar none! Drag racing in a Yugo.. hardly... lol. Besides, give me another alternative that lets me use a 40" LCD as an electronics project output!
As a programmer, I'll let you in on a secret: pretty much 100% of any computer's resources are usually wasted, doing nothing more useful than heating the room. The only time computer power is noticed is when there's not enough.. and for most Arduino projects the computing power is more than excessive for the tasks we ask of it..